I
mmolate, Ruminate, this is why I ‘ate death/doom metal; it’s like a high school vocabulary booster from Hell. Immolate is an Australian sludge metal band, not to be confused with the American death metal band, Immolation, or the American deathcore band, Catalepsy, who wrote a song called “Immolate.” You are, however, invited to confuse them with AC/DC, Black Sabbath, eyehategod, Jesus Lizard, MC5, Mountain, Motorhead, Pentagram, Queens of the Stone Age, Ramones, Rose Tattoo, Scratch Acid and/or Unsane. Not only had I never heard of four of those bands, but I’d never even heard of sludge metal. (To whoever is creating these subgenres: please get a job with a lipstick company or Benjamin Moore and stop subdividing metal into pitchfork passion fruit and ripe molten mango.) To the uninitiated, sludge metal sounds like death metal played with punk rock proficiency. If you’re an aficionado (not to be confused with the NY-based post-punk band), Ruminate sounds like perfectly serviceable sludge metal to me. It’s sludgy, it’s metal, the riffs are just fine and the whole thing creates in crunching chords and battered skins the kind of sulfuric miasma (not to be confused with the Austrian death metal band) conducive to any of an unholy host (not be confused with the American death metal band, Unholy Ghost) of antisocial activities. In case I haven’t made my point clear, there are a lot of bands who compete in this space, and Immolate might as well call themselves Suffocate -- except that there are already death metal bands named Suffocate, Suffokate and Suffocation. A good half of Ruminate would have parlayed well into three-minute punk metal songs including “Hot Heat,” “Kill Your Idols,” “Trap Me” and “Seven Heads.” Idols actually kicks ass in its current incarnation, so I wouldn’t change a thing there. But the band needs to pull itself out of the crowded sonic mire of sludge metal to rise above the competition. Cleaner production (anathema to sludge metal, I realize) and a dose of early Anthrax might be all that’s need to elevate Immolate from the rest of their reprobate metalmates.